While any paladin might fight a dragon in the course of her battles against evil, wyrmslayer paladins dedicate their lives to learning about these powerful creatures and how to combat them most effectively. Presented here are suggestions for playing a wyrmslayer paladin.
Ethos: Compassion and altruism motivate most wyrmslayers. They fight dragons to prevent the wyrms from harming innocents. Occasionally, a paladin becomes a wyrmslayer because of a personal loss or some other tragedy caused by a dragon. However, a wyrmslayer who feels anger or hatred toward dragons must take care to avoid rash acts that endanger her paladin status or the lives of others. She understands the need for careful preparation when battling creatures as powerful as dragons, and applies this principle to other aspects of her life. A wyrmslayer makes plans and contingency plans for everything from everyday adventuring to shopping expeditions.
Skill Choices: Many wyrmslayers take ranks in Ride, since they often ride on mounts to reduce a dragon’s speed advantage. Those who tend to parley with evil dragons take ranks in Sense Motive to guard against draconic deceptions. Some also take ranks in Knowledge (Arcana), as it covers dragon lore.
Feat Choices: Ranged attack feats such as Point-Blank Shot, Far Shot and Mounted Archery improve a wyrmslayer’s ability to fight a dragon from a distance. Mounted charge attacks become feasible if she rides a flying mount, and Ride-By Attack and Spirited Charge increase their effectiveness. In particular, Ride-By Attack allows her to attack and safely move out of a dragon’s reach, forcing it to move and only make a single attack. Spring Attack works similarly but less effectively, as it requires a greater investment of feats and limits the wyrmslayer to her own speed. Lightning Reflexes helps reduce the potential effectiveness of a dragon’s breath weapon.
Equipment: Wyrmslayers should invest in a good ranged weapon as a dragon’s speed and ability to fly sometimes make melee attacks impossible. Against dragons of up to Large size, wyrmslayers often use bolas to make ranged trip attacks and tanglefoot bags to slow them down and make them unable to fly. See “Rules of the Game: All About Movement”, for rules about tripping flying creatures. Naturally, wyrmslayers try to obtain magic weapons with the dragon bane property as soon as possible.
Combat Tips: All but the smallest dragons can make devastating full-attack actions. When fighting larger dragons, wyrmslayers avoid remaining within reach after attacking them, if at all possible (see Feat Choices). When feasible, they use skirmish tactics, closing to make melee attacks and retreating before the dragon can respond. Otherwise, they wear down their opponents with ranged attacks before entering melee and using their ability to smite evil.
Special Mount: Most wyrmslayers call for a flying mount, such as a dire bat, giant eagle, giant owl, griffin, hippogriff or pegasus, in order to engage dragons in the air.
Prestige Classes: Wyrmslayers make natural candidates for a wide variety of prestige classes. Besides the dragon-hunting prestige classes in the Draconomicon, the cavalier and knight protector from Complete Warrior and the highland stalker and wild plains outrider from Complete Adventurer provide a host of abilities useful to wyrmslayer paladins.
With your DM’s permission, you might consider making the following changes to emphasize a wyrmslayer paladin’s special characteristics:
Class Skills: Replace Knowledge (Nobility and Royalty) with Knowledge (Arcana).
Multiclassing: A wyrmslayer paladin may multiclass freely in the ranger class, provided she selects dragons as her first favoured enemy.
Resist Energy (Sp): Replace the ability to remove disease with the ability to cast resist energy 1/day with a caster level equal to your paladin level. Whenever you would gain an additional use of remove disease, you instead gain an additional use of resist energy.
Source: Dragon Magazine #332 (Page 90)